The new Songbird media player promises to make some noise with its extensible …

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I have a confession to make: the first MP3 that I ever downloaded from the Internet was "When Smokey Sings" by ABC. With that embarrassing bit of personal history out of the way, I can now reveal the more unremarkable fact that the first MP3 player that I ever used was Winamp. (Does anyone remember the default Winamp sample? Was the llama thing a Quake reference?) I suspect that there are quite a few others out there in the Ars audience who, like me, were introduced to MP3s and online music with a combination of Winamp and Napster.

Now, almost a decade into the MP3 revolution, the brains behind the original Winamp are making waves again with the release of version 0.1 of a brand new, open source media player called Songbird that can interface with a wide variety of music stores. The big question is, just how significant will those waves be, given the past few years' exponential growth in the size of the online music pool? But before we talk about that, here's the basic scoop on Songbird.

Dinosaur-to-bird evolution

At first glance, Songbird looks like a straight-ahead rip-off of Apple's iTunes music player. If you replaced Songbird's glossy black with brushed metal, you'd be hard pressed to tell the two applications apart at a distance. However, the similarities end at the UI. The two applications are quite different under the hood, and they each embody a very distinct vision of how the online music market should operate.

Songbird is built from the ground up on the Mozilla project. The media player's UI is programmed in the same XML User Interface Language (XUL) that Firefox uses for its UI. Originally invented specifically for the Mozilla project, XUL enables programmers to build an application UI using a markup language, stylesheets, and other Webified techniques. Songbird is also a showcase for XULRunner, a small runtime environment that enables XUL-based programs to run on a machine that doesn't have Firefox already installed.

Much like Firefox, Songbird has (or will soon have) support for user-created extensions. The player's creators haven't yet said what kinds of extensions are in the works, and truth be told I'm not sure they really know at this point. I hope that by the time the Mac version is released (the current beta is Windows-only), there will be an iPod syncing extension available. I also look forward to a satellite radio extension—I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but as an XM Radio junkie I think it would rock.

Songbird's Mozilla roots are a core part of its appeal, because the program's primary selling point is the fact that, unlike iTunes, Songbird can interface with almost any online music service. A screenshot on the Songbird site shows bookmarks in the "Music Stores" folder for Amazon, CDbaby, Audible, eMusic, Connect, and others. Songbird can use web pages as playlists, and can be configured to automatically grab music in a variety of formats (AAC, FLAC, OGG, WMA, MP3, etc.) from a web page or site and play them. This high level of Web integration is ultimately intended to make it very easy for Indie artists and labels to create their own online music stores for Songbird-using customers. The idea is that anyone should theoretically be able to create an iTMS competitor that the Songbird user base can patronize. Who knows, perhaps there will eventually be Songbird support for a certain Russian music site.

BB: Should the RIAA be worried about you? RL: As we say in our FAQ, "We don't steal music and you shouldn't either. We support DigitalConsumer.org's Bill of Rights as the best means to a burgeoning, diverse and lawful digital media market."

But Rob, the RIAA isn't worried about people stealing their music. What they're really worried about is someone stealing, or just generally trashing irreparably, their business model. Of course, Lord knows this, and I think there's a certain element of cheekiness in his answer. The whole point of Songbird is clearly to help build brand new, wholly non-RIAA content distribution mechanisms and music markets on the Internet. The last thing the RIAA wants is for consumers to have real options for purchasing music, and if Songbird succeeds it'll be because it enables such options.

Will Songbird ever have one-click shopping?

The first and only song that I ever purchased from iTMS was—you guessed it—"When Smokey Sings." I felt like someone would come and take away my geek card if I had never made an iTMS purchase, so I went ahead an ponied up the $0.99 for the download. I decided to make that one-off, impulse purchase primarily because I know Apple as a company and a brand, and I trust them with my credit card information. I would probably be significantly less inclined to hand over the Visa to, say, Fly-By-Night Records Online Music Emporium for a track from some random indie band.

My point here is that iTMS works not because it's integrated with iTunes but because Apple has managed to move online music into the "impulse buy" category. iTMS purchases are painless and safe in a way that's going to be very hard for indie music stores to replicate. Elsewhere in the Boing Boing interview, Rob Lord says the following:

Why wouldn't you buy your bluegrass in one place and your trance music in another? Why shouldn't there be music communities like lastfm and others that focus on specific niches? Even if you could buy all your music in one place, like Wal-Mart, would you want to?

Actually, yes, I would want to buy my music from a single place. When you buy music from a single place, you have to give only one party your credit card info. I'd rather have my information on file with Wal-Mart than with eight or ten smaller operations that just started last year and that are run by God-knows-who. Of course, I know quite well that large companies have been losing consumer credit card information right and left, but that still doesn't make me any more comfortable giving out that information to the little guy.

What independent music stores need is a single sign-on, like Microsoft's Passport and Sun's Liberty Alliance were supposed to be. I think there may be a good business opportunity here for a company that could provide such a thing, especially if that company has a known track record as a supporter of open source. Google, Sun, anyone?